


Into Wonderland

by HeartEyes4Mariska



Category: Law & Order: SVU
Genre: Alternate Ending, Assault, Based on a Tumblr Post, Blood and Injury, Closet Sex, F/M, Hotel Sex, Implied/Referenced Cheating, Jealousy, Love Confessions, Resolved Sexual Tension, Revelations, Season/Series 10, Semi-Public Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-15
Updated: 2021-03-15
Packaged: 2021-03-23 06:29:04
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,778
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30051336
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HeartEyes4Mariska/pseuds/HeartEyes4Mariska
Summary: Inspired by a Tumblr post that read: "watching season 10x04 and the scene where elliot goes to press dick for the truth and dick thinks its about olivia  .... what if it was"An alternate ending one-shot for Lunacy
Relationships: Olivia Benson/Elliot Stabler
Comments: 3
Kudos: 20





	Into Wonderland

**Author's Note:**

> Rating: MA, NSFW  
> Spoilers: Lunacy, Closet, Swing, Paternity, Fault  
> Trigger warnings: physical assault, descriptions of violence, blood, injuries, implied adultery, references to homicide, semi-public sex, sex with risk of getting caught, ejaculation in vagina
> 
> This fic is for Tumblr user liviot

Elliot's years had been filled with surrogate fathers. Coaches, fathers of his school friends, then the Colonel – on and on, through the Marines and then into NYPD. He hadn't been very old when he understood that expecting Joe Stabler to be his role model for the man he would ultimately be was going to leave him shortchanged.

But now, with the way Dick Finley had shown back up in his life, Elliot had a creeping fear that even his hard-won surrogates may have instilled certain things in him that would need weeding, like a garden overrun.

The hotel room door swung in, and Dick's face loomed large, forcing El to strangle the anger that stuffed his chest.

“Hey, Elliot – I wasn't expecting you,” the older man was sheepish as Stabler pushed inside.

“I bet you weren't.”

In the back, there was a short-haired brunette near the foot of the bed, and for one paralyzing moment, El thinks it is Olivia. It makes his gut drop so hard that he pales. Then he blinks, and it's just a brunette in her underwear.

“You! Time to leave,” he barks at her, hurrying her along, tossing her purse into her hands. Elliot shuts the door behind her, his rage beginning to get the better of him.

“Well, that was awkward, huh?” Dick tries to laugh it off, but Elliot is not responding, so he moves to the next assumption as to why he's come there: “Okay, okay. I'm sorry about Olivia.”

Elliot bristles at the sound of her name on Finley's lips.

“You know, I should have checked with you before asking her out to dinner. I mean, if _you're_ not gonna make a move – ”

“Dinner with Olivia is off,” El cut him off.

“I think that's up to her to decide, don't you?” Finley pushed back.

This wasn't why Elliot had come here. Or was it? Technically, he had come because of the fingerprint that had been identified on Marga's necklace, but now that he was there, standing in front of the man he'd hero-worshipped for so long, knowing what he knew . . .

Elliot's hands curled into fists at his sides. Now there was a son at home who had been named after a man who was a murderer, and his partner was no doubt on her way to the very room he was standing in, dressed like every inappropriate thought he'd had in 10 years come to life. Even better, Elliot himself had introduced them, knowing Liv's weakness for approving older men, knowing how she liked to please him when it came to his friends.

“Excuse me, I got to get dressed,” the Colonel broke into his thoughts.

“What'd I just say?! Forget about Olivia!”

Finley’s expression was a leer; Stabler had no doubt the astronaut was tipsy. “Now who would purposely try to put a woman like Olivia out of their mind?” he chuckled. “Oh, wait, I know – an unhappily married ex-Marine who doesn't have the _balls_ to put his _mouth_ where his fantasies are.”

Christ, he was going to kill him. The idea of Finley thinking of Olivia that way . . . naked, fantasizing –

_You mean the way you do?_ the voice in his head reminded him.

_It's not the same_ , he thought immediately, _I –_

_What? You **love** her?_ his mind taunted. _Enough to sabotage every relationship she's had with a man in ten years, but not enough to tell her?_

“Dick,” Elliot said through gritted teeth, and it could have been the man's name or a curse in equal measure.

“I'll tell you what,” Dick smirked at El, from the reflection in the mirror over his shoulder, “I'll just borrow her for tonight, and you can take your turn tomorrow.”

Elliot crossed, wheeled him around by the shoulder and punched the Colonel in the jaw, sending him stumbling backward into the closet with his tie still not completely knotted. He hardly gave the man enough time to catch a breath before he grabbed him by the lapels and yanked him back to his feet.

“Talk like that about Liv again, and the girl who I just kicked out'il be the last piece you ever get,” El hissed.

“Christ almighty, Stabler!” Finley swiped his hand under his nose and it came away bloody. “Date or no date, I still got a function to go to!”

“That's the least of your worries right now.”

“I seriously underestimated how bad you want her,” Dick chuckled, shrugging off his dress shirt, which was now stained. “Jeez, bud, I'm surprised your head hasn't popped off from the tension. You've had _ten_ fucking years!”

The older man was digging through his clothes while Elliot continued to boil over, like a kettle whose whistle was being ignored. Was he drunker than El had imagined, or simply unable to grasp that there really was a line that he had crossed that had altered their camaraderie? He couldn't tell which.

Not that it mattered, he was going to kill him anyway.

Approaching Finley from behind as he was looking at dress shirts, Elliot hooked an arm around the astronaut's neck below his chin and dragged him backward out of the wardrobe. “Olivia wouldn't _touch_ a guy like you,” he grunted, shoving the man forward and offering his fists again.

It wasn't Dick's asking her to dinner – that was just an obscenity on top of the rest of the ugly revelations. It was all of it, everything, brought to a head by the feeling that had paralyzed him when he had glanced the brunette in the room. It was the break of his heart at the understanding this meant his marriage would end, relief at the acceptance of that thought, grief over realizing his mentor had been a monster in hiding, and shame that he had dragged Olivia along for a decade.

Yet, Colonel Dick Finley was still chuckling in Elliot's direction as though they were just having a cock-measuring contest – and that was making El most enraged of all, that this one-time surrogate father couldn't even recognize his grief.

He launched at Finley a third time, fists flying, and managed to pin him. Blow after blow, blood flying and knuckles breaking open, the monster was at last going to be vanquished. The only thing Elliot saw was his fists, all he heard was the strained rush of his hot breath burning in and out of his lungs.

Until Olivia entered the room.

The door slammed open into the wall, and Elliot was aware it was Liv without having to turn around. Still, he kept hitting.

“Elliot!” she barked, to no effect. She rushed forward, reaching to pull him off of the older man, and as soon as her hands touched his shoulders, he stilled, panting, hunched forward on his knees. “ _Elliot_ – ” the second time it came out as a concerned exhale.

El struggled to his feet, turning around, anticipating asking for her cuffs. It had escaped him completely that she had actually arrived to find him obliterating her dinner date. She was dressed in a knee-length satin dress that was cut low enough that he figured she couldn't possibly be wearing a bra. Then he remembered his own cuffs, pulling them from his belt and leaning back down to Finley.

“What the hell, Elliot? What's going on?” Liv asked.

He couldn't bring himself to look at her in that dress, not with his chest full to bursting and his hands covered in blood. “The fingerprint on the necklace is his,” El told her, his eyes on the carpet. “Finley killed her.”

“She was going to take the moon from me!” Dick shouted, the words garbled through his wounded mouth.

Elliot ignored him and led the man out of the room as Olivia watched, open-mouthed in shock. A few minutes later, Liv was hurrying along to catch up with him, waiting just outside the hotel's entrance for the bus and the patrol car he had called for.

“El, did he – what did he say? Did he confess?”

“Not in so many words.” He handed the cuffed man off to the paramedic who approached them.

“Why were you attacking him?” she pushed.

“Liv,” he sighed, his tone a warning for her to back off. The patrol car pulled up, and he conferred quietly with the cop, telling him what hospital to go to, and where to take Finley afterward. Olivia was still waiting silently when he was done, and he had to look at her again. The dress was plain, other than the low cut; a medium blue color that set off the way her dark eyes caught the light. He knew no dress was really plain once Liv put it on.

“Are you okay?” she asked him quietly.

“No,” he admitted.

She glanced at his hands, getting a real look at his mangled knuckles. “Jesus, El . . . ” she reached for a hand gingerly, “You sure you shouldn't get your hands checked out? You could have broken something.”

“They're fine,” El mumbled stubbornly, but as she touched him, he startled and hissed in pain.

“No, they're not. C'mere,” Liv ordered, and then she was pulling him along behind her, back inside the hotel.

Just off part of the main lobby there was an event room, clean, dark except for the light spilling in from the lobby. A long table covered in a white cloth had jugs of ice water and glasses laid out. Liv pulled Elliot inside, dropping into a seat at the end of the table. She poured up a glass of the ice water, grabbing a linen napkin from the table and wetting it, then took El's hand into the light.

Gently, she cleaned his swollen knuckles, surveying the damage. After a long couple of minutes, she said, “I'm sorry, about Colonel Finley, Elliot.”

Her partner cleared his throat. “Yeah. I'm sorry I beat up your dinner date.”

Olivia stilled for a second so brief it could have been illusory, then spread the napkin on the table, scooping ice cubes from the water glass onto it. “It wasn't a date,” she replied, “not like that, anyway.”

“Not for you, maybe,” El chuckled, “but Dick doesn't know a kind that ends in a friendly handshake. I think it's part of the reason he killed Marga.” He hissed again as she laid the makeshift icepack on his hand.

“You think he killed her because she was a Lesbian?”

“No, I think he tried to charm her into bed, and when it didn't work because she was gay, he took her out of the equation.”

“To get to the moon,” Liv filled in.

“Yeah.” He sighed. The rage was burned out of him now, and he was left with devastation, loss, the anxiety of wanting to tell her everything. In the light from the lobby, he could see down her dress from where he stood, and he flushed, caught off guard. She switched to the opposite hand. He cleared his throat. “What am I supposed to tell Dickie?” he asked.

For a moment, she was thrown. Then she answered, “You'll find the right way to tell him, El.”

“I'm not sure telling people important things is what I'm good at.” The light was catching the shine in her hair, and his chest ached with emotion.

“You can try it out on me first, if you want,” she told him, smiling as she put the icepack on the second hand.

“I love you.”

“That's a nice start,” she nodded without looking up.

“No, Liv – not Dickie. I'm saying I love _you_ ,” he repeated.

Olivia froze. Elliot was unknowingly holding his breath. When she looked up, her dark eyes were wide.

“Did Finley hit you in the head?” she deadpanned, but the look in her eyes was that of a cornered cat.

Exhaling, El gave her a lopsided grin. “Liv – ”

But she didn't let him get any farther than that, as she tossed the bloodstained napkin full of melting ice onto the table. She stood abruptly, turning away from him without making eye contact. Elliot grabbed for her and caught her by the wrist, wincing as his swollen hand closed.

“Olivia, pl – ”

She whirled on him and slapped him across the face. The mostly-empty room echoed the sound back at her, and it startled her enough that Elliot was able to keep his grip on her. Behind them, the event room had its own coat check, and he pulled Olivia against him and then backed them up into it together. The light from the lobby didn't reach that far, and so they were swathed in blackness.

“What the hell are you doing?!” Liv spat.

“Trying to keep us from getting kicked outta here,” he rumbled.

“It might be a good idea – you clearly need your head checked!”

“My head is fine; will you just calm down for a minute?!”

She stopped resisting, their breathing loud in the enclosed space. “Let me go, and I will.”

Elliot's knuckles throbbed with relief as he released her. “I'm not crazy,” he told her. “I came here to pick Dick up after I got the call about the necklace – I didn't even know he had invited you to dinner. But in his room, there was this woman . . . a brunette.” He fumbled, not at all sure how to explain himself as his pupils strained in the dark to see in front of him. “I – I thought it was you, Liv,” he confessed, swallowing hard.

A pause stretched out then, until she finally scoffed, “You thought I was going to sleep with the Colonel . . . because he invited me to dinner?”

“Not just that; he made . . . comments, this entire time he was supposedly helping us. I always knew he was a skirt-chaser, I just – ” El took a deep breath, “never thought he'd hit so close to home.”

Olivia smacked him in the chest, but there was no anxiety in it this time, just exasperation. “Elliot, you idiot. I agreed to go to dinner because he was important to you, not so he could talk me into bed!”

“I'm sorry – I just, I couldn't trust him anymore, and I was jealous.”

There it was: even in the pitch dark, he could feel her tense up as they moved back into dangerous territory. She thought of her recent breakup with Kurt Moss, of how when Elliot had found out, he had rushed to Kurt's office to confront him. Remembering the tension in the room between the two men when she had walked in that day, the fact of Elliot’s rearranging Dick's face became much clearer.

When she spoke again, her voice was softer, cautious. “El . . . don't you think, with everything going on with Kathleen, and now Colonel Finley, that this is probably just all a, a stress reaction?”

He laughed in earnest at that. “Oh yeah? You think I'd react to a crisis by falling in love with you?”

“ _In love_ ” she breathed, “Elliot - ”

“You've known me for more than ten years, Liv. Please. Stop acting like this is something I just dreamt up.” He thought about the car accident when Eli was born, and not knowing at first if he had lost one or all three of them. Then before that, about Gitano, and Liv laying on that train station floor, pale hands at her throat like startled birds.

“You and I both know that this isn't a midlife crisis, or a head injury, or my reaction to Kathleen's diagnosis,” he murmured. He thought about how much he had wanted to talk to Liv after Katie was taken to Riker's, how being in the doghouse with Kathy was nothing, but he couldn't let Olivia walk out of the cribs.

_I'm through the looking glass, here, Liv._

If that had been the case, then surely now he was all the way in Wonderland. He didn't need light to know where she was; he reached for her and she was there, inches away in the ink-black. Elliot cupped her cheek with an aching hand.

“I love you, Liv,” he told her again, starting to enjoy the feel of the words as they moved over his tongue.

She sniffed. “Dammit, Elliot. Where was this two years ago?! Before, Eli, before you moved back home?”

“I know. I know, I'm sorry.” And he was.

There, in the strangest of places, he moved forward and guided his mouth to hers in the dark, feeling the moisture of her tears touch his skin, the lack of light heightening their sense of touch. The kiss was a dropped match that took a single beat to set a fire ablaze: the taste of her mouth, the thin satin dress that was hardly thick enough to hide the curves of her body – suddenly the pendulum swung the other way, and they were starving for one another.

Olivia's mouth opened and Elliot took it, tasting her tongue, then filling it with his own. She moaned and his cock twitched so violently he shivered. They both knew they weren't about to make love; this was, instead, the physical manifestation of a sigh of relief that had been held for ten long years.

He walked her backwards until their bodies met the nearest wall in the dark closet, soothed at the press of her body into his own. Liv's hands were at his neck, pulling his mouth as hard to hers as she could get it, and when their hips aligned she grunted low in her throat. Careful of his injured hands, El raised one to the bust of straining satin, cupping a breast softly.

“I knew you weren't wearing a bra,” he whispered, then pulled the material to the side and freed what part he wanted to put his mouth on. Starting at the side of her neck, he let her scent and skin be his map in the dark, sliding his mouth down over her clavicle and onto the warm soft globe in his hand.

Elliot's mouth closed around her nipple and sucked greedily, selfishly wanting to mark her, to make it obvious so that no other man would ever try to stake a claim again. Tongue, teeth, licking and scraping, he felt Liv's nails dig into the nape of his neck as she worked to keep her moans quiet. He moved, shoving his knee between her legs as he pulled her other breast free and repeated his assault.

To retaliate, Olivia worked her hand between their bodies and pushed against the bar of steel that had taken up residence where his cock should've been. Just the light brush of her fingers made him catch his breath and pull away.

“Not this time,” he panted, “unless you're looking to embarrass me.” He chuckled, knowing that he was wound tight enough that her teasing would be game over.

“Then you better come on and fuck me,” Liv spoke into the dark, “because I’m done with having to rely on my imagination.”

El's body broke out in goosebumps head to toe at the aching want in her voice. His hands slid to her hips and shimmied the dress up to her waist as her hands fought to open his pants. He pushed her panties down far enough for them to fall to the floor and let Liv step out of them, then hoisted her legs around his waist and grit his teeth against the protesting pain in his swollen hands.

Somehow, they made it work, just as they had always made things work between them over the years. When Elliot's cock slid home, Liv let out a quiet sob that forced him to pause. He stroked her cheek with a hand. Letting her accept it, physically and emotionally – that he was hers, and wasn't going anywhere. He throbbed wildly inside her, his breaths shuddering.

“God, you're so wet,” he groaned next to her ear, “is all that for me, Liv?”

She threw her head back against the closet wall, clenching around him inside of her. “That, and so much more. Move your ass, Stabler.”

Obeying, he began slowly, sliding partway out and then thrusting all the way back in. Their patience couldn't last, however, and within a few strokes, El had sped up and was fucking her as hard as possible without being loud enough to get them caught. Olivia was licking her lips and making a noise that was halfway between a whimper and a growl. It went straight to his cock as his desperation to mark his territory nearly drove him beyond the pale.

“I need both my hands, Liv,” he panted. “Touch yourself for me.”

Olivia didn't hesitate, slipping a hand to her pelvis. Her teeth captured her bottom lip as her fingers slipped across her furious, engorged clit. It hardly took half-a-dozen haphazard strokes and she was coming around him hard as he continued to thrust. Elliot was exultant, his chest swelling with a ridiculous, overwhelming pride. For a moment, he was the rooster in the chicken yard, he was the first lover she had known, he was reborn.

“ _Again_ ,” he growled, pushing her even harder into the wall, grinding his hips as he fucked her.

“You . . . first!” she bit out, clenching him again, counterthrusting without taking her fingers from her clit.

Olivia’s body convinced him, and Elliot bit into her shoulder as he orgasmed inside her so intensely he saw stars in the dark. The throb of his cock finishing inside her drove Liv into her second, and he clutched her as she shook in his arms.

As surreptitiously as was possible, they straightened themselves out as they caught their breath. Making sure the coast was clear, they slipped out of the closet back into the shadows of the event room, then into the lobby, trying not to draw attention to themselves.

“An entire building full of bedrooms and we do it in a coat closet,” Liv giggled quietly as they pushed through the porch and out into the warm Summer night in the parking lot.

Stabler blushed, faintly. “Mm. I suppose next time I should take a page from Finley's book and start with dinner.”

Liv tipped her head, looking at him with a grin. “Let's start by getting you some painkillers for your hands. There's only one thing I want you to eat, and lucky for you – no hands required.” She winked as his jaw dropped open.

He stopped short, watching as she kept walking, her heels clocking the pavement loudly in the night. Then Elliot hurried after her, his heart pounding with awe and delight of how she was the moon, and all the stars in his sky.

**END**

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